My Dream House

"Between them, our parents had about seven thousand books. Whenever we moved to a new house, a carpenter would build a quarter of a mile of shelves; whenever we left, the new owners would rip them out. Other people's walls looked naked to me. Ours weren't flat white backdrops for pictures. They were works of art themselves, floor-to-ceiling mosaics whose vividly pigmented tiles were all tall skinny rectangles, pleasant to the touch and even, if one liked the dusty fragrance of old paper, to the sniff."
--Anne Fadiman, "My Ancestral Castles" in Ex Libris.

I wouldn't have minded moving into a house recently vacated by the Fadimans! As you can see, I too have "mosaic" walls. But not, alas, built in bookshelves.